


Slide Away

by Reki-L2S (crimsonherbarium)



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Arguing, First Kiss, Fix-It, I'll make my own Renga reconciliation, Kyan Reki is a Mess, Love Confessions, M/M, Making Up, POV Hasegawa Langa, Post-Episode: s01e09 We Were Special Back Then, clumsy teenager feelings, no beta we die like men, with blackjack and hookers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 07:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30119079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimsonherbarium/pseuds/Reki-L2S
Summary: “I didn’t know you felt this way about me,” Langa manages after a moment. It comes out hoarse. It stings his eyes, his throat. Reki resents him. Reki, the first friend he made in Okinawa. Reki, the one who always has his back. Reki, who feels more like home to Langa than anything else in this unfamiliar country. He’s half-Japanese, but he feels like an imposter pretending he belongs here. Reki is the one who helped him find his place. And he…Langa swallows hard against the lump in his throat.
Relationships: Hasegawa Langa/Kyan Reki
Comments: 14
Kudos: 190
Collections: Discord Community Archive





	Slide Away

Langa knows when he hears the faint sound of crashing and muffled swearing that he’s finally in the right place. 

He stops Reki’s board with his foot when it rolls toward him. Even though the streetlights only cast a faint sodium glow, it’s obvious that the board is in much worse shape than the last time he saw it. Langa frowns, bending down to pick it up. Reki hasn’t been bringing it to school with him lately. He gave Langa some half-assed excuse when he asked about it, something about building a new deck, but there was something in his voice then that didn’t sit right with Langa. And he’s usually pretty clueless, so if it’s obvious to him…

Langa turns the board over in his hands. It’s busted up pretty bad. It looks almost as awful as the one he used in his first beef with Shadow. Reki’s been falling off this thing a lot. The bottom is so scratched up that the design painted on it is almost gone. 

Reki was proud of that one, too. Langa bites his lip, remembering how many pages in Reki’s notebook are covered in different iterations of it. It isn’t like him to let things get this bad.

A moment later, Reki comes walking out from the other side of the halfpipe. He freezes when he sees Langa there.

Reki doesn’t look much better than his board. His jeans are torn, and his hoodie is scuffed and dirty. His hands are practically plastered with Band-Aids. 

“What are you doing here?” Reki says after a tense moment, and his voice is small and broken.

Langa holds out the board. “Looking for you. What are _you_ doing?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Reki looks away.

“Here.”

Reki doesn’t take the board until Langa practically pushes it into his hands. 

“...thanks.”

“Are you okay?”

“Huh?” Reki looks down at his bandaged hands like he’s only just noticing them. “Yeah. Sure. Shouldn’t you be at Crazy Rock?”

“I didn’t feel like going.”

“Stupid,” Reki mutters.

“Huh?”

“I said this is stupid!” Reki practically shouts it, and the sound echoes back from the walls of the halfpipe. 

Langa flinches. “What’s going on with you?”

“You—” Reki groans, grabbing a fistful of his own hair by the roots, and hurls his board to the ground. It clatters when it lands. One of the wheels spins sluggishly in the streetlight. 

Langa hasn’t been sure what to expect, but it definitely isn’t this. Reki is usually animated, quick to anger but just as quick to cool down. Lately, he’s been withdrawn, but this…

This isn’t like him.

“...I can’t do it,” Reki says, head bowed, and his voice shakes like he’s holding back tears. 

“What?”

“The Casper slide.” Reki rubs clumsily at his eye with the heel of his hand. “The one ADAM used in the beef with me. I’ve been trying for days and I can’t—fucking—do it. I can’t do the move Joe was trying to teach me either. I can’t do tricks like Miya. I’m not as fast as Shadow. I can’t skate like you. I’m…” He drops onto the pavement and buries his face in his knees. 

Langa stands there for a moment, blindsided by the force of Reki’s outburst. 

“What do you mean, like me?”

Reki looks up, teeth clenched, clearly frustrated. “What do _you_ mean? Don’t you hear them talk about you? Everyone wants to watch you skate. No one gives a shit about me.”

“Miya said the Casper slide was one of the hardest tricks in freestyle.” Langa sits on the ground near Reki, resting his cheek against his knee. The concrete is warm through his jeans. He’s still getting used to that. Okinawa is never cold, even after the sun goes down.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” Reki shakes his head. “Yeah, it is. You remember how long it took you to get it?”

Langa stays quiet. 

“One afternoon, right?” Reki answers the question for him, hugging his knees. “I can’t keep up with someone like you.”

Something squeezes in Langa’s chest. It’s not exciting, the way it feels when he’s skating and his heart is racing so fast he can barely hear anything over it pounding in his ears. It doesn’t feel good. 

It just hurts.

“I thought we were having fun,” he says. “Wasn’t that the whole point? You were the one who wanted me to skate with you. You were the one who took me to Crazy Rock. You were the one who made me sneak out every night and practice—”

Reki laughs, and it comes out hysterical. “But we haven’t been skating together, have we Langa? _You’ve_ been having fun. I’ve been standing on the sidelines. Everyone in the S community is talking about how amazing you are. How crazy your air is. How you pull tricks no one’s ever seen on a skateboard before. And then there’s me, the loser kid who tags along with SNOW. You know what they have to say about me? Nothing.”

Langa looks away. He can’t meet Reki’s eyes. He can’t believe that this has been going on for so long and he hasn’t even noticed. He can’t reconcile this Reki, the anger, the biting words, the bitterness, with the cheerful, encouraging Reki who taught him how to Ollie. Who cheered him on with a grin the first time he managed to stand on a skateboard without falling. Who pulled an all-nighter to build him a board from scratch, tailored and tweaked so that he would never wobble in a corner. So that he could jump without being scared of falling. 

So that he could feel that rush, the same one he’d treasured when he snowboarded with his dad, again for the first time in years. 

“I didn’t know you felt this way about me,” he manages after a moment. It comes out hoarse. It stings his eyes, his throat. Reki resents him. Reki, the first friend he made in Okinawa. Reki, the one who always has his back. Reki, who feels more like home to Langa than anything else in this unfamiliar country. He’s half-Japanese, but he feels like an imposter pretending he belongs here. Reki is the one who helped him find his place. And he…

Langa swallows hard against the lump in his throat. “I wanted to skate with you.”

“And then you left me behind.” Reki sounds just as hurt. Just as angry. “You left me behind and you didn’t even notice. S was my thing, right? And now no one even cares if I don’t show up.”

What was it his mom said? _Be honest with your feelings._ Langa cringes internally, but Reki’s already bared so much of himself, scraped open on the pavement, that he feels like he might be able to say it without being embarrassed. 

“I do,” he protests. “I’m here, right? I don’t care about S, Reki. The only reason I started going in the first place was because we...went together. It’s not the same without you.”

“Cheering you on from the sidelines?” Reki says bitterly.

Langa shakes his head. He grips the fabric of his shirt, so hard his knuckles turn white, right over his heart. It thuds in his chest anxiously. Like he needs to bail. He can’t look at Reki. He can’t move at all.

“Skating beside me. Reki, I—” He breaks off, struggling with himself. “Skating is supposed to be fun, right? You said that to Miya after our beef. I thought I was having fun because I was skating against people who were talented, but I was wrong. My heart wasn’t racing because they were good at skating. It was racing because…because you were watching me.”

Langa forces himself to look up. Reki is still curled in on himself. He wants to shake him.

“Reki,” he says urgently, pushing himself up onto his knees. “I...I want to skate with you. I don’t care about ADAM. I don’t care about the tournament. None of it matters without you. It isn’t fun. I would have lost the beef with Joe if you hadn’t been there. Because I...because when you yell my name it makes my heart pound.” _Shit, that was lame._ Langa grimaces internally and forces himself to keep going. “Reki, I...like you. A lot.”

Reki finally looks up. His eyes are red, Langa can see from this distance, and it looks like he’s been crying for a while. Langa grips at the fabric of his jeans anxiously, clenching his teeth. 

“Seriously?”

“Uh. Yeah.” Langa shifts uncomfortably. This is it, then. The part where Reki tells him he doesn’t want to hang out anymore. The part where he swaps desks in class so they don’t have to sit next to each other. The part where he hands in his S pin so Reki won’t have to see him at Crazy Rock. No more training with Miya. No more bumming rides from Shadow. No more—

“If you like me, why’d you break our promise?”

Langa looks away. “I don’t know. I could try to make an excuse, but that sucks even more, doesn’t it? I’m sorry.”

“Fuck.” Reki wipes at his eyes and then presses the heel of his hand into his forehead. “This is so not how I pictured this going down.”

“Huh?”

“I like you too, idiot.” Reki runs a stressed hand through his hair. “Why do you think I’m so—” He groans. “This is all wrong.”

“Is your board okay?” Langa asks stupidly, because his brain is struggling to process what Reki just said. 

“—what?” 

“Your board.” Langa points at it where it lays upside down on the cracked concrete. 

“Oh. Probably not. I need a new deck anyway, though…” Reki trails off. “Langa, is...that seriously how you feel?”

“...yeah.” Langa can feel his face burning, but it isn’t as humiliating as he imagined it would be. 

“Um…” Reki reaches out, hesitantly at first, like the first time they dapped, but instead of bumping fists with Langa he grabs his hand. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.” Langa squeezes Reki’s hand back. “I shouldn’t have bailed on you like that. You were just looking out for me. I was too stupid to see it.”

Reki shakes his head. “I was being selfish. Yeah, ADAM scares the shit out of me, but…” He looks away. “If you beat him, and I didn’t, I didn’t think I could take it. I shouldn’t have made that your problem.”

 _Making friends, fights, making up—you end up doing everything through skateboarding._ Joe’s voice drifts back to Langa, through the memory of pumping adrenaline and the wind rushing through his hair. _It’ll be alright if it’s you two._

Joe’s right, Langa is realizing. And it barely even matters that his hand is sweaty, because Reki’s is sweaty too, and their fingers are clumsily interlaced, and he’s sure that Reki’s heart is beating just as fast as his is right now.

“Why _aren’t_ you at Crazy Rock, anyway?” Reki asks after a moment, sighing. “You’re gonna miss the next round of the tournament, aren’t you?”

“Oh.” Langa looks away. “It’s no good, anyway. After the beef with Joe...one of the kicktails on my board snapped.”

“You could’ve bought a new deck. I bet Oka would give you a discount.”

“I don’t want a new one,” Langa says fiercely. “I don’t want to skate if it’s not this one. Because I—because you made it for me.”

Reki sighs. “You want me to fix it?”

“Would you?” Langa looks up, eyes pleading. 

“I can try. Fixing a deck is harder than making a new one.” Reki frowns. “You got it with you?”

Langa shakes his head. “It’s at my place.”

“We better go get it, then.” Reki gets up, dusting off his ripped jeans with one band-aid plastered hand, and pulls Langa to his feet with the other. “C’mon.”

Elation soars in Langa’s chest. He holds tight to Reki’s hand, a hesitant smile on his lips.

“...hey, Langa?” 

“Hm?”

Reki scuffs the ground with his sneaker. “Do...can you teach me? How to do the Casper slide. I want...to get better. So we can skate together again.”

Something squeezes in Langa’s chest again, but this time it doesn’t hurt. It feels…

“Yeah,” he says. “That sounds fun.”

He turns to go but Reki pulls him back.

“Reki?” Langa says, confused. “Wh—”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because Reki is kissing him, and all of a sudden he can’t breathe, and his heart is pounding in his ears, and this is scary, so much scarier than sliding down a mountain at sixty miles per hour without a helmet. 

But it’s also exciting. It’s that rush of adrenaline in his veins. It’s the feeling he’s been chasing the last few weeks. It’s the warmth of Reki’s breath against his skin and the way their hands are laced together so tight it nearly hurts. 

He’s so relieved he almost wants to cry. 

Reki grins when they pull apart, and that adds to it. Langa realizes with a pang that he can’t remember the last time he saw him smile. He’s been missing it, more than he realized. This Reki. Things don’t feel completely normal, but then again he doesn’t really want them to. He doesn’t need normal.

He just needs Reki.

Reki bends down to pick up his busted deck and tucks it under his arm. “C’mon, let’s go get your board. I might have stuff to fix it in the garage, but I need to look at it first.”

Langa nods, still shell-shocked. “Okay.”

His heart doesn’t stop racing as he and Reki walk hand-in-hand through the darkened Okinawa streets. It’s better than snowboarding. It’s better than S. It tops any high he’s ever chased.

Reki smiles, and Langa isn’t drifting anymore.

He’s home.

**Author's Note:**

> _Now that you're mine  
>  We'll find a way  
> Of chasing the sun  
> Let me be the one that shines with you  
> In the morning we don't know what to do  
> Two of a kind  
> We'll find a way  
> (To) Do what we've done  
> Let me be the one that shines with you  
> And we can slide away_
> 
> [Title and Lyrics for maximum suffering from Slide Away by Oasis]
> 
> I know ep10 is coming out in like 2 days but I literally can't take it anymore. I need them to make up so badly :c my heart hurts
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the fic 💖♾️💙
> 
> EDIT 3/21: HA I WASN'T THAT FAR OFF, WAS I? BLESS STUDIO BONES FOR THE FOOD


End file.
